1938 Marple’s Catalog

Marple’s Catalog from 1938

Love these old catalogs and hand books. I was browsing through some on wkfinetools.com the other day. Early mechanical saws were scary looking machines. Some of the catalogs from pre WWI give you instructions for ordering via telegraph. Cool stuff Conductor. Keep em coming.

I have a Fayette R. Plumb catalog dated 1900 with telegraph instructions. I probably have 55-60 altogether, but I can’t get a lot of them to load.

All these old catalogs are really neat. I have always enjoyed using hand tools and going through these can be a real education. 

I need to get some more loaded up. Some of them just won’t upload for some reason.

I have a bunch of old Craftsman power tool cats going back to the late 20’s or very early 30’s

I love old catalogs, tool or otherwise. Fascinating to see.

Thanks for sharing Conductor!

It looks like many, if not all, the tools were hand drawn. That’s amazing. I can’t imagine myself drawing detailed depictions tools (or anything really) all day. Nowadays we have super high res photography that makes hand tools look amazing. Not sure if your familiar with Lie-Neilson toolworks but they have a catalog of hand tools that could be used as postcards, really nice stuff. 

It’s cool to see how things were done back in the day. To me, it feels like everyone was hand made and hard to do. Now, everything is digital. Funny story, I showed the owner of the sign shop I work for a video on YouTube. It was some guy making a hand made sign for John Mayer. I was blown away by how intricate and detailed the sign turned out. The owner just looked at me and said “That’s just how we did thing’s back in the day, what’s so special about that?”. I had to laugh because it’s so true. 

That was really interesting. It’s always cool to see publications from that far back. It’s also pretty amazing when you think about it, those tools are still holding up today.  People still use them and they keep on ticking. Certainly built to last.